Tech

Samsung Galaxy Note 3: So Much Phone, So Much Power

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Samsung Galaxy Note 3 Review

Not Just a Big Screen

The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 takes the Note line to full HD with a 1,920 x 1,080 Super AMOLED display. Its best feature, however, is the stylus, which is enhanced by a new menu system called Air Command.

Bright, Colorful Screen

The full HD screen looks beautiful, although the 5.7-inch size isn't for everyone.

S Pen slot

The Note line's trademark stylus, the S Pen, slips out of a slot on the right.

Air Command

Clicking the stylus button while hovering over the screen causes Air Command to appear -- a circular menu the serves as a reminder of what you can do with the S Pen.

Action Memo

Action memos let you turn handwriting into actionable commands.

S Note App

S Note gets an upgrade in the Note 3 with a redesign and Evernote integration.

S Pen Redsign

The S Pen is improved from previous generations: It's reversible, and it has grooves that improve the grip slightly.

USB 3.0 Port

The Galaxy Note 3 is the first mainstream phone to have a USB 3.0 port, which is larger than the standard microUSB connector. However, the new jack is capable of faster transfers and charging.

The phone's speaker and a microphone port are on the bottom as well.

Power Button

The only thing on the right side is the power button.

Volume Buttons

Like previous Samsung phones, volume controls are on the left.

Faux Leather Back

The back of the phone is still plastic, but a faux-leather design and soft-touch texture gives it a more chic feel.

Galaxy Gear Integration

The Galaxy Note 3 is the first phone to work with the Galaxy Gear smartwatch.

Text Recognition

Samsung's text recognition is much improved, translating these notes on the Galaxy Note 3 almost flawlessly.

Pen Window

Pen Window calls up a small window where you can put some specific apps, and it even works in multi-window mode. Here there are two YouTube windows running, each with videos playing in smaller windows in the bottom right. Pen Window has called up Google Hangouts.

Action Memo Use

Here, an action memo is translated into an email address.

Scrapbook

With the stylus, you can clip websites, photos -- pretty much anything that's onscreen.

Magazine

Magazine mode, designed by Flipboard, aggregates content from various sources depending on what page you're on.

Multi-Window

Similar to other Samsung devices, the Note 3 lets you run two apps on the screen at the same time.

Samsung Apps

Samsung consolidates its pre-installed apps into a folder, and there are a lot. Few are of any real use.

Gear Manager

If you have a Samsung Galaxy Gear, you can manage it from your Note 3.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is the best Samsung phone I've ever used. It's big, it's powerful and it finally turns the S Pen — the small stylus that goes hand-in-hand with the Galaxy Note line — into something useful. It's even better than the Galaxy S4.

To love the Galaxy Note 3, though, you need to get over it's plus-size screen. That's not too tall an order these days, as most notable phones these days have large displays. No, our hands haven't gotten bigger, but we're also more used to tablets and the advantages a bigger screen can offer.

At least with the Note 3, Samsung didn't get carried away. Although its 5.7-inch screen is larger than the 5.55-incher on last year's Galaxy Note II, the device's overall footprint is the same. That means it's no harder to hold and involves about the same amount of finger stretching to operate with one hand. (Hey, at least it's not as ridiculous as the Samsung Galaxy Mega.)

Design Write

The size may be similar to the previous model, but Samsung has really taken design to the next level. The Galaxy Note 3 upgrades the plastic back with a faux-leather feel that's pleasing to the touch. It's a gimmicky move (the material is still plastic), but an effective one. The of the phone is grooved metal instead of smooth plastic, which is prettier and, more importantly, bestows a better grip.

The stylus is improved, too. The Note 3's S Pen is reversible, so there's no chance of putting it in "backwards" — a great feature that makes you wonder why it took Samsung three tries to get this right. There are grooves on the stylus, too, matching the phone design with the respective improvement in grip.

Notably (no pun intended), the Galaxy Note 3 is the first mainstream phone to sport the new USB 3.0 connector. The new connector may mean faster hard-wire data transfers and charging, but it's a big step backward, design-wise: It actually makes the physical jack significantly larger, looking like your micro USB cable has a cancerous outgrowth. At least old cables are backward-compatible with the port on the phone.

The ginormous screen is one of the main reasons you buy a phone like this, and Samsung has finally given the Note the display tech it needs to really shine: a 1080p full HD panel. It's still a Super AMOLED, which can occasionally suffer from artifacts, but I didn't notice any. The display was also significantly brighter than other AMOLED screens I've seen.

With such a enormous, high-resolution screen, the Galaxy Note 3 takes away one of the last reasons you'd want a tablet in addition to this device. Kicking back to watch Captain America: The First Avenger on Netflix, I quickly got immersed and forgot I was watching the movie on a phone. I could see pixelation at various times, but that likely had more to do with Android and Netflix than the phone itself — high-res photos looked very crisp.

The sound coming from the bottom speaker was decent, but for smartphone audio, nothing so far has beat the HTC One's front-facing stereo speakers.

Air Command

For many Galaxy Note 3 users, it begins and ends with the device's huge screen, and they're sure to be satisfied. The Note has another key audience, though: power users. For them, the stylus and its capabilities matter most. The new Note has something special for them.

Samsung has created a new stylus-specific menu — a semi-circle with five commands that appears the moment you slip the stylus out of its dock. You can dismiss it by tapping (via S Pen or fingertip) anywhere else on the screen, then call it up anytime, anywhere by hovering the stylus over the screen and then pressing the button on the shaft.

The menu, called Air Command, is probably the best upgrade to the stylus yet. It serves both as a useful aggregator of S Pen abilities and a helpful reminder of what they are. It's also well-designed — the circular menu stands out from the typically rigid look of Android and most apps.

Air Command has five items: Action Memo, Scrapbooker, Screen Write, S Finder and Pen Window. Some are extremely useful, others not so much, but this is a situation in which I can't blame Samsung for offering more options. Power users often swear by a specific feature that seems minor to most, and it's an audience the Note aims to please.

Action Memo will instantly call up a special kind of notepad intended for short, actionable notes. You can write a phone number, email address, website or even a search term, then circle the text, and the phone will show you a strip of actions: tap phone, message or the browser and the app instantly translates your scrawl into numbers, text or a URL.

Action Memo is technically impressive, but there was no situation where I felt it was faster than simply typing by hand on a virtual keyboard. I'd rather have this ability in the regular S Memo app, since it would be more useful at times when I'm not actually planning to perform the action in question anyway.

Scrapbooker is pretty great. It amounts to an on-phone, personal Pinterest board. Once you activate Scrapbooker, you can use the S Pen to capture anything you draw a border around. It selects the content intelligently, so if you want to capture, say, an image from the browser, the loose line you draw around it will become straight when you close the border.

Scrapbooker will save the URL and accompanying data, too. For example, if you Scrapbook an Instagram photo, it saves the location data, caption, number of likes — whatever is captured within your drawn-on border.

I probably used Screen Write the most. This is the S Pen's screen capture function — something it's had since Note 1. Still, it's probably the most useful stylus tool, letting you scribble notes on things like maps and websites quickly and easily.

More Air

S Finder is the new way to search content on the device. It's actually quite impressive, since it uses optical character recognition to incorporate handwritten notes into the results.

My main problem with S Finder is that you must use the S Pen to engage it. After activating the app, it doesn't even offer you a note to write on — you get a keyboard instead. As far as I can tell, the only reason to make S Finder a stylus-specific ability is to fill out the Air Command menu.

Finally, there's Pen Window, which is not so much useful as it is addictive. Using the S Pen, you just draw a window of any size, and then pick an app to appear in it. It's only a limited set of apps — relatively simple apps that can resize easily — but it's actually pretty fun to see how many different-size windows you can fit YouTube, the Calculator or Google Hangouts into.

Pen Window also lets you take Samsung's multi-window feature to absurd levels. Multi-window lets you run two apps on screen at the same time, and Pen Windows lets you add a third. I actually managed to take it even further in YouTube, using the app's built-in ability to have floating videos, creating a situation in which I had two YouTube windows. Both were playing videos in pop-out screen, all the while running Google Hangouts (I technically could have had another YouTube video open, too). Hardly practical, but fun.

At the same time, Samsung's S Note app gets an upgrade. It's redesigned with simpler menus and better iconography. Even better, the handwritten notes now sync with Evernote, and if you buy the Note 3 you get a year of Evernote premium service as part of the deal. Pretty sweet.

S Note's handwriting-to-text ability appears improved over previous generations — it did a great job of translating my scrawl into real words, even when my text size varied wildly and I wrote things really tightly. I really like how S Note has evolved; Samsung has turned it from a "might use once or twice" app to something that's potentially an essential part of your digital life.

All the stylus power is great, but there's an annoying catch: the rear camera. While the 9-megapixel camera is fine (sample pic below), it protrudes from the back a couple of millimeters. That leads to an unfortunate wobble if you ever put the phone down to write on it — you know, like a real notebook. I saw this same problem in the Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet, and it's a shame Samsung didn't learn from the mistake.

Notable Firsts

As important as the stylus is to the Galaxy Note 3, the phone actually has quite a few unrelated extras. The infrared blaster on top of the phone lets the Note 3 stand in as your remote control when necessary. The Peel remote software works well, and if your system is simple enough (say, a cable box and a TV), you may even be able to pack your old remotes away in a drawer.

The Note 3 is also the first Samsung phone with Magazine mode. Developed in partnership with Flipboard, Samsung's Magazine mode appears modeled after HTC's BlinkFeed, itself a Flipboard clone. Engage it from the home screen by pressing the Home button or swiping up.

Your Magazine is divided into several sections, including Personal, Social and Here & Now. Each shows a visual menu of different content — personal is photos, messages and calendar events; Here & Now includes mostly local deals and sports scores. Flipboard may have helped create Magazine, but it feels like a colder clone. I can't see myself ever consciously using it, especially since it's not front and center, like BlinkFeed is on the One.

The Galaxy Note 3 also has the special distinction of being the first phone to work with the Samsung Galaxy Gear smart watch. I got a chance to use the watch a little, as an extension of the phone, it's not bad. It's certainly convenient to get alerts about texts and incoming calls on your wrist — the very "glanceable" information it was made for. Is it enough to justify picking up the Gear? Mashable's Christina Warren has a lot to say about that.

I have to admonish Samsung for the slow gallery app — something that's been a problem with virtually every Galaxy I've used. For some reason, the Gallery is insanely slow in calling up thumbnails when I select an album. There's a quad-core processor in there; it's ridiculous that I'm waiting up to 10 seconds to see an image. Fix it already!

Lastly, the battery drains faster than the Galaxy Note II. That's to be expected — you can't upgrade to both increase the screen size and upgrade to full HD and expect outstanding battery life. After a day of heavy use, the Note 3 made it to about 7:30 p.m. before it needed a recharge. Not horrible, but not awesome for a device whose biggest fans are power users.

Final Scribblings

Despite some annoyances, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is still a cut above most smartphones today. At $299 (with a contract), it had better be. Of course, seeing the virtues of the Note requires that you fully accept its size. If gigantic phones aren't your thing, it's no Note for you!

Even if you think a big-screen phone is too much trouble, consider this: Why do you want a tablet? A larger display certainly has its advantages, and if you're worried about one-handed operation, Samsung even throws in some settings to help with that, too.

The Galaxy Note 3 has the goods to be both your phone and tablet, and that's even before you slide the stylus out of its hiding hole. Once you do, the entire experience moves up a notch: From simple sketching to converting handwritten notes to text, the Galaxy Note's stylus, enhanced by Air Command, has finally evolved from odd curiosity to significant differentiator.

For anyone who felt their smartphone was separated from the lands of precision and power, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 has what it takes to be a bridge. The only question is: Are your pockets big enough?

The Lowdown

What's Good

Gorgeous full HD display

Air Command menu is ingenious and helpful

Excellent handwriting-to-text conversion

What's Bad

Some S Pen functions questionable

Rear camera gets in the way of notebook

So-so battery life

Bottom Line: The Galaxy Note 3 is the best Samsung phone you can buy — with a beautiful full HD display and stylus functions that are truly useful — as long as you can get over the humongous screen.

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